Imagine what it would be like to get outrageously drunk or high during school. Well, with Joseph Minden’s Answerlands, you don’t have to. His new collection supplies us rare devourers of poetry with enough classroom hallucination to survive the drab realities of pupil-teacher antics. Minden, both poet and English teacher, may not be able to take Shakespeare far from the school whiteboard, but his second collection, published by Carcanet, certainly can churn similes from even the most worn-out corners of the secondary-school curriculum.
Every page feels like schoolboy English on LSD. Except you’re an overworked teacher who moonlights as a writer whenever he can steal a few minutes. Minden chooses a spirit animal in ”Paddock’, the second witch’s familiar from Macbeth – an unsurprising yet fitting companion for a teacher of literature – to accompany him through the late-night marking. The collection pitches its readers straight into the “corridors and classrooms” where we watch “teachers falling from dreams” from the very first poem. It’s vital that you quickly get used to his peculiar, wacky, but oddly satisfying double vision, which forces you to blink from line to line. The real achievement of Answerlands hangs delicately on whether these metaphor-laden illusions about school life manage to click into place. Thankfully, more often than not, they do.
Of course, there are misfires. Any collection with Minden’s level of invention is bound to possess the odd dud. What’s surprising is that it’s the shorter poems that occasionally let Answerlands down. By the time we reach the halfway point of the gruelling main body, titled by the dates of a miserable teacher’s calendar, the strings holding the collection together begin to slacken. The brief detours into the author’s “poetry club”, for instance, fail to resonate with the same emotional weight or depth as the longer, more ambitious renderings of a teacher’s inner life. These snippets feel like sketches rather than complete thoughts, though even they demonstrate Minden’s instinct for rhythm and his knack for turning a classroom moment into something strangely mythic.
Minden teaches English at Cardinal Newman Catholic School in Brighton. The reader senses his attempt to pass on both the joys and the frustrations of poetry to his students. He frames Shakespeare’s works like a book spine, name-dropping famous linguists and educators, revealing the bones of a collection built from the classroom where passion so often goes to die. Minden is drawing his journey across the schoolyard as if it were an epic metaphor or a half-remembered mythological encounter. Beneath the surface, the English syllabus lies subconscious, binding him even against his will to those he teaches.
Minden’s most effective classes on poetry appear in the works titled ‘Corridor Fragment’. As students skip from lesson to lesson, Minden can be seen observing teachers who “flit to classrooms, arms swinging from yesterday to tomorrow and tomorrow”, capturing the exhaustion of those forgotten warriors we hand our children to each week.
Answerlands is a must-read for anyone desperate for a break from the mundane. Each poem considers the weight education places on both staff and pupil, and Minden never shies away from forging poetry out of marriage difficulties, burnout, or the immense responsibility teachers feel toward their students.
Words by Harry Speirs
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